why terence b. stood up george w.

Shortly before he dropped into Iraq for less than 24 hours, President Bush did something of a drive-by in New Orleans to commemorate Katrina's second anniversary and his continued indifference to its aftermath. I commemorated that presidential non-event in this piece about trumpeter Terence Blanchard in this week's Village Voice:

Sitting in a rented room in the Faubourg-Marigny section of New Orleans, around the corner from the jazz clubs lining Frenchmen Street, I thought about the late-August day that had just passed: the second anniversary of the floods resulting from the levee failures after Hurricane Katrina. President George W. Bush dipped his toe in the city for the occasion--dinner at a Creole restaurant, a quick address delivered at a Lower Ninth Ward school--and then slipped out of town again like a criminal on the run.

I had headphones on, listening to trumpeter Terence Blanchard's new Blue Note CD, A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina). But also rattling around my head was what Blanchard had told me months ago, when I visited his uptown home: "This president has gotten away with a lot. And in New Orleans, he got away with murder."